Beijing, China
October 16-20, 2000

F0 Correlates of Topic and Subject in Spontaneous Japanese Speech

John Fry

Linguistics Dept. & CSLI, Stanford University,
Stanford CA, USA

This paper examines F0 correlates of morphologically marked
grammatical functions, in particular topic and subject, in spontaneous
Japanese speech. Our data consist of F0 measurements
of 7,106 nouns in the CallHome Japanese corpus of telephone
conversations [4]. We find that topics exhibit higher peak F0
than subjects, contradicting information-structure accounts which
predict that topics, which refer to ‘old’ information, should be
less prominent. However, we suggest that the style and genre of
speech is an important factor in this regard.